I’ll take the dead-ender Jacobinism over the kind of open cynicism advanced by the likes of Marc Thiessen:

Obama has accused Republicans of hostage taking. Let’s be clear: I’m all for taking hostages. Both sides do it all the time. But one of the first things they teach you in Hostage Taking 101 is that you have to choose a hostage the other side cares about saving. Obama and the Democrats don’t care about stopping a government shutdown. With a shutdown, Republicans are essentially putting a gun to their own heads and threatening to pull the trigger if the Democrats don’t capitulate. Not surprisingly, it’s not working.

Some congressional Republicans can’t seem to get it though their heads: When it comes to a government shutdown they . . . have . . . no . . . leverage. By contrast, when it comes to the debt-limit showdown, they do have leverage; while Obama can let the government close and blame the GOP, he cannot allow the United States to default.

You hear this a lot lately inside the Beltway: “Oh, those crazy Tea Party types. Their heart is in the right place. They justdon’t understand tactics!”

True!

But are they any worse than the self-styled savvy operatives who lick their chops at the prospect of effective hostage-taking? Or, if I may employ a torture-era metaphor that Thiessen will appreciate, the prospect of crushing Obama’s testicles? Or threatening to waterboard the global financial system, perhaps?

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28 Responses to Sympathy for the GOP Rebels

I guess I’m in the mushy middle on Obamacare. I will probably benefit from it personally, but resent the way different Senators were bought off, pro life Democrats were lied to, and then the Supreme Court saved it by calling it a tax after the administration assured us it was not. But I do admire the guts of the 30 that are following through on their campaign promises. I wish there were 30 willing to go to the mat on the issues near and dear to my heart–reducing abortion and stopping illegal immigration.

But are they any worse than the self-styled savvy operatives who lick their chops at the prospect of effective hostage-taking?

Related to your previous post, this might be a cultural division between people who raise their money at conferences and cruise junkets, versus people who raise their money from action emails and banner ads. The two require very different stage performances on C-SPAN.

While the whole Heritage Action/Club for Growth fundraising paradigm is simply a replication of the Obama ’08 campaign model, I can’t help but notice the outcome is really different, and it’s completely shocking to me how many people out there are willing to part with $5 a shot on the bare assertion that it will “Help kill Obamacare.” There’s no one to vote for, the actual vote that’s going to happen isn’t really spelled out, the email is written by some intern in a cubicle. It’s just completely bizarre that people would listen to a PAC or advocacy group instead of their own House member or Senator.
Why did they vote for these people in the first place, if they were just going to chuck them over the moment some lobbyist sent them an email with lots of ALL CAPS and italics?

” But I do admire the guts of the 30 that are following through on their campaign promises.”

I suspect that is not “guts” so much as it is bald self interest. If they do not take the country down the suicide-path, then they will have to face primary elections against someone even more far right.

I’m noticing a lot of people mentioning the electoral bind GOP House members have themselves in. This is the unforeseen consequence of gerrymandering. If House members were accountable to an honest cross-section of their geographic peers, rather than a dwindlingly pure cherry-picked group of voters, they wouldn’t be forced to play to the ideologues.

I really don’t think “guts” has anything to do with it. My sense is that once this all comes to an end (in two weeks tops) these “men standing on principal” will admit they were unable to move the Leviathan, blame Obama, and use their “courageous” stand to gather more money to protect their Congressional seats.

These 30 know they will lose, and never had any intention of winning, they are just appeasing the people who will ensure they can survive primary challenges in their otherwise safely Red districts.

I’m glad that someone is willing to come out and admit that the current Republican Party consists of “knuckleheads” and “thugs”. Pick your poison, indeed; or perhaps go with a different, non-toxic party entirely?

Scott, I think you have the principles right, but you miss in the application. People who lean Democrat will blame Republicans for the shut-down, true, but people who lean Republican will see the funding bills without Obamacare that Republicans are passing and Democrats are blocking, and will blame the Democrats. In other words, the shutdown may inflame tempers and harden positions, but it won’t fundamentally move public opinion one way or the other. To the extent that the Democrats’ constituency is heavier with rent seekers than tax paying Republicans, they will feel the effects of the shutdown more acutely.

As for the debt-ceiling limit, it is a fiction that the government will stop paying its bills if it isn’t raised. The government will still have money coming in to pay it’s bills. It just won’t have to ability to go out and borrow more money to pay the rest of government expenses, particularly entitlement payments, salaries, and other things that should have been slashed by the shutdown, but haven’t. In other words, the threat of the debt limit ceiling will be a real cessation of government services the President wants, rather than just those he is willing to inflict on the public for politics’ sake.

If the U.S. is going to stop increasing the public debt, both parties are going to have to sit down and decide what government expenditures have essential to its purpose and which must be written off for others to take up – a true devolution of government power. Not an easy pill for Washington solons to swallow.

@Matthew Stevenson If House members were accountable to an honest cross-section of their geographic peers, rather than a dwindlingly pure cherry-picked group of voters, they wouldn’t be forced to play to the ideologues.

Which would most likely produce a different set of House members. I have no doubt that playing to these gerrymandered districts takes a very special breed of politician … and not simply from an ideological perspective.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing right now is that the talents it takes to win and hold gerrymandered Tea Party districts have little or nothing to do with the talents it takes to actually govern.

Wait till the TEA Partiers go head to head with Medicare and Medicaid (keeping in mind that 2/3 of Medicaid funds go to pay for nursing home care for the elderly.) They will find out quickly what refusal to compromise looks like.

By not blinking during the government slimdown, the House GOP has demonstrated it means business on the debt ceiling. If they blinked on the slimdown, everyone would know they would never risk default. The slimdown is a victory, a chance to educate the American people about the true cost and benefits they receive from the federal government. My bet is most won’t even notice 40% of the federal government is not at work, and I say that as part of the 60% that is still working.

So our provider, uh, provided us with the info on the next nearest play we’ll have available under the (un) affordable care act. The premiums are 38.7 percent higher than last year. Slightly lower deductible, slightly higher maximum out of pocket costs.

It’s going to take a lot of ‘tax credits’ to make up that difference, if we’re even eligible.

@M_Young For the record – did your previous policy have annual or lifetime caps on benefits?

Because your experience seems well out of line with most of what is being reported.

But if your previous policy used benefit caps to mitigate their risk, they certainly would have been able to charge lower policy rates. Then again, doing so generally transfers risk to society at large, which has to absorb the costs of bankruptcies and unpaid hospital bills when people exceed the maximum benefit of their insurance policies and are unable to pay for high cost coverage that they receive.

You can criticize the Rs for their tactics in fighting Obamacare, but let’s make sure to heap 10x the opprobrium on the Ds for passing the godawful thing in the first place (with their own set of shady tactics at that).

“@M_Young For the record – did your previous policy have annual or lifetime caps on benefits?”

For the first part, for sure no. Quite the opposite, it had an annual yearly maximum out of pocket cost (which is now, as I said, slightly higher under the nearest equivalent plan I was offered). For the second, without looking, I am pretty sure there wasn’t one either (I read the fine print when I signed up a few years ago, and a lifetime maximum was something I was concerned about).

“At the end of 2012, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, the third-largest health insurer in the country, warned that many consumers would face “premium rate shock” with the advent of Obamacare’s major insurance regulations in 2014. He predicted that unsubsidized premiums would rise 20 to 50 percent, on average.

For some people, premiums would double. “We’re going to see some markets go up as much as 100 percent,” Bertolini told Bloomberg News.

Aetna isn’t the only company forecasting higher health-insurance premiums. In California, Blue Shield has asked regulators to approve premium increases of up to 20 percent. [an underestimate !] Obamacare’s new regulations were a factor in the request. A spokesperson for the company said the new law “will bring a lot of volatility” into the market.”

Look, Obamacare extends the risk pool to the very highest risk people, and to the very lowest income people. There is simply no way doing that isn’t going to impose most costs on someone. I know it is an article of faith on the left that insurance companies are made up of a bunch of fat cats who spend their days smoking cigars and being served martinis by comely former dental hygienists. But in California, at least, and I suspect in the rest of the nation, a low of health insurance is provided by non-profits (Kaiser, Blue Cross/Blue Shield) who run pretty lean. My own provider had admin costs of 21.7% last year (I know because I received a small check for the difference over 20%).

I can’t see those administrative costs decreasing by much– in fact, I see them going up. There will be a lot of not too bright people coming into the system, a lot of people who don’t speak English (the President himself boasted of a help hotline with 150 languages available). The cost of compliance with such a complex bit of legislation must be now, and will no doubt continue to be, incredible.

The ‘plight of the uninsured’, especially of people who lose jobs and lose coverage when they have pre-existing conditions, is something that needed to be addressed. But please don’t lie to me about it not costing anything. Overall, the ACA is going to be a big wealth transfer from the healthy to the sick, the young to the older, the native-born to the immigrant, the (previously) prudent to the currently reckless.

Did Thiessan not take Hostage Taking 201? If he had, it would know that you also have to be willing to shoot your hostage. So if he is advocating that they should hold the debt limit hostage that means he is advocating for the US defaulting on its debt.

I don’t think Thiessen is being so cynical — he is simply invoking the old chestnut, “It’s worse than a sin; it’s a mistake.” That is, regardless of whether a tactic might otherwise be deemed good or bad, you shouldn’t employ it if it’s just not going to work.

The ’30’ can easily still vote against funding Obamacare – the House brings a clean resolution, it passes primarily with Dem support, and the Republicans go home and tell the voters they voted against it every time, but a couple of RINOs sold the party out. It only takes about 18 Republicans for the bill to pass with Dem support.

People here are missing a key factor about the debt limit. Nobody knows what happens in the US government defaults. Nobody knows for sure that default can be or will be avoided. Obama is right that default would result in millions of jobs loss, but *not* in the first few days. Very little will happen in the real economy over that short of a time period.

Financial markets will react. And since markets hate uncertainty and there is nothing more uncertain than this, the response will be large and if it extends long enough, maximal. Maximum decline is around 9-10K points on the Dow so we not talking a run-of-the mill correction.

Everyone is 100% *certain* than we will *not* go over the debt limit and so the market is completely ignoring it. If this is true then the GOP has *zero* leverage with the debt limit. TO have leverage they have to create a *widespread perception* that they may very well actually do this. If they are successful, we will see the market drop a few thousand points. If the market does *not* drop a few thousand points then Democrats can call the Republican bluff on the debt limit.

In other words to *prove* they mean business the GOP has to crater the markets (and who does *that* hurt). Once conservatives start seeing their assets evaporate, will they feel so sanguine about the Republican strategy.

As a Democrat who is knowledgeable about the market (and who stands to benefit if the GOP does refuse to increase the debt limit) I say…

So, what the initial essay and the comments amount to is that those rich enough to buy politicians with appropriately named “chump change” will throw everybody else under the bus in the name of “Freedom and Fiscal Prudence”?
Where, oh where, have all the conservatives gone,
where, oh where can they be?
With their tails docked off and their ears so long…